A station may establish a connection to a communications network to perform a variety of different functionalities. One such functionality is a voice call in which a first station and a second station may communicate with each other via the network using voice data. A particular implementation of performing the voice call is Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA), which is a standard, defined under 3G mobile telecommunications networks such as Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). The WCDMA standard uses a Direct Sequence-Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) channel access method utilizing a 5 MHz channel for both voice and data to achieve the transmission speeds thereof. The WCDMA standard also supports both a Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) method.
When a network uses WCDMA, voice frames may be transmitted between the two stations. The voice frames may be configured for transmission using a variety of different protocols. For example, a Blind Transport Format Detection (BTFD) may be used for the voice frames. The network that utilizes the BTFD method may use Transport Formats (TF) of 0x148 and 1x148 for signaling of the voice frames. The 0x148 TF may be a 0-rate TF while the 1x148 TF may be a full-rate TF. As such, the 0x148 TF may not have Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) bits attached while the 1x148 TF may have the CRC bits attached. The station may receive these 0x148 and 1x148 TFs from the network to subsequently receive the voice frames. However, it may be difficult for an outer loop power control to detect an error in the CRC bits of the 1x148 TF to adjust a target power to receive subsequent signaling frames. For example, the outer loop power control may not be capable of differentiating between a missed transmission and a control transmission (e.g., a Discontinuous Reception (DRX)/Discontinuous Transmission (DTX) when the network is a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network).
Accordingly, the outer loop power control of the station may not adjust or increase the power despite more power being required to compensate for the missed transmissions. This may result in various drawbacks such as dropped voice packets during the WCDMA voice call that ultimately lead to a bad user experience. Furthermore, the outer loop power control of the station may inadvertently adjust or increase the power despite a lower power that is already in use and is fully sufficient for the transmissions. This may also result in various drawbacks such as increased power consumption, particularly when the station relies upon a portable power supply that is limited.